Tuesday, December 27, 2011

THE HOLY NAME

January 1st has long
been celebrated as the Feast of the Circumcision, a commemoration of one of the
three traditional birth rites that Jesus, as the child of a Jewish mother,
naturally underwent. Interestingly, though many other feast days were abandoned
by the churches that broke with Rome at the time of the Reformation, the Feast
of the Circumcision was generally retained, notably by the Lutherans and the
Anglicans. It remains a major feast of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In more
recent liturgical Western practice, however, it has been conjoined with, and
even been replaced by another birth rite – the Naming of Jesus – the title that
is now used across the Anglican Communion.

In medieval times Christ’s
circumcision was thought theologically significant because it marks the first
time that his blood was shed. It thereby signified his true humanity, while at
the same time pointing forward to his redemptive sacrifice in the blood of the Cross.
It is harder to give an equally straightforward account of why the Feast of the
Holy Name matters.

Yet the explanation is not so
very far to seek. At birth each one of us is given a name, and normally this is
the same name that we take to the grave. Our names do not describe us, and any ‘meaning’
they once had is quite coincidental. Yet it is by a name, not a biographical
description, that we introduce ourselves to each other. The first step in getting
to know me – who I am – is getting to know my name.

So too it is with ‘Jesus’. The
name means ‘Savior’, Matthew’s Gospel tells us, and it is so widely regarded as
‘holy’ that only rarely is it used for anyone else. The Feast of the Holy Name can
be thought of as subsuming all that Jesus did within the knowledge of who he was. It
invites us both to encounter and to dwell upon the Person in whom all the
events of Nativity, Baptism, Ministry, Crucifixion and Resurrection are united
in a single story of salvation.